[Terrapreta] Testing if microbes decompose soil minerals

[rukurt at westnet.com.au]

adkarve wrote:
> <snip>
>
> One way of removing all the organic matter would be to heat the soil in a muffle furnace, so that all the organic matter is burnt away. However this treatment would also kill the microorganisms. It would just be impossible to put them back into the soil, because we just do not know how many types of micro-organisms had originally existed in the soil, and in what numbers. 
>   
This was a problem I foresaw also. Would a culture of microorganisms 
prepared by something like the "bokasi" method that was used in the 
Philippines and spoken of in the REAP Canada pages be capable of 
providing an inoculum for such sterilized soil? There would always be 
the problem of particular species of microbes that might not make it 
through to the sterilised soil though and those that *did* make it 
through not being the right mix..
> In such situations, where experimenting is not easy or not possible, one resorts to surveying a large number of samples, so that one can draw statistically significant conclusions. Correlations between human diseases and dietary agents that cause them are derived in this manner. There is a sufficiently large number of farmers in India who apply to their fields no fertilizers of any kind, those who practice only organic farming, those who apply large doses of chemical fertilizers, and also those who practice the sugar-cowdung-cow urine method of farming. It is thus theoretically possible to get the yield data of all the different categories of farmers and to analyse it statistically. Unfortunately, I do not have the money to this. So here the matter rests for the time being.
Pity about that! Some people need a wink from a telephone pole to 
convince them.

Kurt